Lauren Klein

A screenshot of a Word doc with tracked changes enabled, displaying the first part of the table of contents of a book. It reads: Preface, Introduction: A History of Visualization and Power. 1 Data: The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Responsible Design Before there is data, there are people. How can the lives behind the data guide our visualization work? 2 Image: William Playfair and the Politics of the Simple View Visualization has never been neutral or objective. How can we learn to recognize the decisions that shape each design? 3 People: Shanawdithit and Our Place in the Colonial Frame Maps, like all visualizations, tell stories. How can we learn to see the lines of power that they draw? 4 Knowledge: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Value of Epistemology Visualization can produce knowledge in many ways. What perspectives do we gain when we expand our view of the past? 5 Change: Lula Iola Mack, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Visualization for Liberation Visualization can bear powerful witness to oppression. How can we use charts to make change in the world?

A second screenshot with the rest of the ToC. It reads: 6 Labor: Data by Design and What We Learn from Visualization Work By Margy Adams and Tanvi Sharma, with Shiyao Li, Jay Varner, and Lauren Klein Any visualization project is the work of many hands. How can we surface the meaning of this labor? Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

Copyedits for DATA BY DESIGN! Twelve years of this project and the actual end is in actual sight of my actual eyes!!!

Screenshot of a course description that reads: Surviving the Textpocalypse. The advent of generative AI has been described as a ¿textpocalpyse," with chatbots producing content ranging from ¿AI slop¿ to missile target suggestions. As literary scholars and as people in the world, how do we survive? This course, paired with a humanities graduate seminar, will explore this question through theories of resistance, refusal, and reimagining; and through practice by gaining knowledge about how genAI works. Our goal is to implement strategies of survival and worldbuilding.

Pretty excited for HOW TO SURVIVE THE TEXTPOCALYPSE, the seminar I'm teaching at @emorycollege.bsky.social next fall with @shsalter.bsky.social (and with a nod to @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social for title inspo)

This is SO COOL — a lost Méliès film from 1895 in which a person plays a briefly out of control robot. How timely. So glad some of my tax dollars are still going to stuff like this

This resonates sooooo much.

Yayyy! You got this!

Touche

A very necessary response, but most enamored by fact that the president of a major university can name actual specific research projects undertaken by his faculty

The US isn't the exception; it's the outlier

Why oh why is it an essential part of my writing process to spend at least 24 hours per chapter in a state of complete and utter conviction that everything is a mess, that I have no good ideas, and that I never will

Hey guys? You could help out a little more. We stopped calling it "women's work" — but we never stopped making it women's work.

The most helpful men in the world still do less unpaid labour than the vast majority of women. Yeesh.

Lots of fascinating data and charts in this one!

www.not-ship.com/hey-guys-you...

Seed Grant Awardees 2025-2026 February Newsletter reflecting on luddites, the seed grants awardees for this year and the hidden costs of AI.

Why are the Luddites the current emblem of tech resistance? I think it's that the Luddites safely constrain the problem space--and also, maybe inadvertently, the scope of possible solutions. Glad to be able to write some of this down in the February AIAI newsletter.
mailchi.mp/707b81b70010...

reposting as this will be such a valuable book for PhD students, postdocs, and really anyone who wonders how to combine humanities & technology in the workplace - abstracts due March 15!

Edited by an amazing team - @kallewesterling.bsky.social @lisaironcutter.bsky.social & Jeanelle Horcasitas

Today's viz inspo

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

Ah, it’s the waking up in the middle of the night with a line edit phase of finishing this book

👀

Waiting to see how long it takes institutions reinstate the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs they shut down, re-hire those they pushed out, and rewrite all the language they rushed to change.

Something tells me it'll likely be a long wait.

Congrats!!!

Journal of Cultural Analytics Enters New Chapter with CDH, Joins Open Journals Collective Journal of Cultural Analytics Enters New Chapter with CDH, Joins Open Journals Collective

CDH announces new role as publisher of @culturalanalytics.bsky.social! New website launches with expanded vision for cultural analytics scholarship, supported by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program. JCA also joins @ojcollective.bsky.social. More on editorial team and new features below.

Had not seen this. Thanks!

The term "DH" may no longer be necessary in all contexts anymore. But again, that's not because the field is over. Not in the least. It's because it's won. 9/9

Is all of this work called DH all the time? No. But that's because it no longer has to be. The term DH helped to give this work legitimacy. It brought attention, built capacity, and yes--and justifiably--attracted funds 8/

Same goes for area of focus. Which humanities fields are thriving now? Which courses have waitlists in the dozens? It's critical race and ethnic studies, the same that are doing the most innovation in digital spaces rn--in fact, the very same that the projects mentioned above take on 7/

It also must be said out loud: it's not a coincidence that the projects above are led by women, nonbinary folks, and people of color, and they are not *still* recognized by some as DH. 6/

Oh, but by DH you meant only quantitative work? I direct you to The Discourse ca. 2012. DH does not only mean computation. It never has. In fact, it was the people who rejected this assertion way back then who left the field 5/

miriamposner.com/blog/some-th...

What about impact, you ask? I raise you SUCHO, DEFCON, the Colored Conventions Project. These are major and enduring interventions, with impact in communities and entire countries. They are actually changing lives 4/

Take a look at your grad students. Where are they getting interviews? What skills are they expected to have?  At least in my experience, it's digital skills that departments still desire 3/

Where is DH now? It's everywhere. Find me a student who has not made a podcast for a class, or a website for a final project. Or even one who counted words. It used to be a fight to call any of this pedagogy. It's not anymore 2/

My contribution to the discourse, which I've said before and will say again: DH isn't over. DH has won. 1/

There is only ever one complaint about "woke humanities" at its root: sheer fury that somewhere, someone "undeserving" (to be clear, they mean Black people) could get funding, however little. It is exactly the same as attacks on the NEH, attacks on welfare, the DOGE cuts. Different verse, same tune.